Howard Barker’s ‘monstrous assaults’: eroticism, death and the antique text

Howard Barker is a writer who has made several notable excursions into what he calls ‘the charnel house…of European drama.’ David Ian Rabey has observed that a compelling property of these classical works lies in what he calls ‘the incompleteness of [their] prescriptions’, and Barker’s Women Beware Women (1986), Seven Lears (1990) and Gertrude: The Cry (2002), are in turn based around the gaps and interstices found in Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women (c1627), Shakespeare’s King Lear (c1604) and Hamlet (c1601) respectively. This extends from representing the missing queen from King Lear, who Barker observes, ‘is barely quoted even in the depths of rage or pity’, to his new ending for Middleton’s Jacobean tragedy and the erotic revivification of Hamlet’s mother. This paper will argue that each modern reappropriation accentuates a hidden but powerful feature in these Elizabethan and Jacobean plays – namely their clash between obsessive desire, sexual transgression and death against the imposed restitution of a prescribed morality. This contradiction acts as the basis for Barker’s own explorations of eroticism, death and tragedy. The paper will also discuss Barker’s project for these ‘antique texts’, one that goes beyond what he derisively calls ‘relevance’, but attempts instead to recover ‘smothered genius’, whereby the transgressive is ‘concealed within structures that lend an artificial elegance.’ Together with Barker’s own rediscovery of tragedy, the paper will assert that these rewritings of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama expose their hidden, yet unsettling and provocative ideologies concerning the relationship between political corruption / justice through the power of sexuality (notably through the allure and danger of the mature woman), and an erotics of death that produces tragedy for the contemporary age.

Sarah Kane: Cool Britannia's reluctant feminist

Aleks Sierz in his important survey of mid 1990s drama has identified the plays of Sarah Kane as exemplars of what he terms ‘In-Yer Face’ theatre. Sierz argues that Kane and her contemporaries such as Mark Ravenhill and Judy Upton represent a break with the ideological concerns of the previous generation of playwrights such as Doug Lucie and Stephen Lowe, whose work was shaped through recognizable political concerns, often in direct opposition to Thatcherism. In contrast Sarah Kane and her generation have frequently been seen as literary embodiments of ‘Thatcher’s Children’, whereby following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the inertia of the Major years, their drama eschews a recognizable political position, and seems more preoccupied with the plight of individuals cut adrift from society. In the case of Sarah Kane her frequently quoted statement, ‘I have no responsibility as a woman writer because I don’t believe there’s such a thing’, has compounded this perception. Moreover, its dogmatism also echoes the infamous comments attributed to Mrs Thatcher regarding the role of the individual to society. However, this article seeks to reassess Kane’s position as a woman writer and will argue that her drama is positioned somewhere between the female playwrights who emerged after 1979 such as Sarah Daniels, Timberlake Wertenbaker and Clare McIntyre, whose drama was distinguished by overtly feminist concerns, and its subsequent breakdown, best exemplified by the brief cultural moment associated with the newly elected Blair government known as ‘Cool Britannia’. Drawing on a variety of sources, including Kane’s unpublished monologues, written while she was a student just after Mrs Thatcher left office, this paper will argue that far from being an exponent of post-feminism, Kane’s drama frequently revisits and is influenced by the generation of dramatists whose work was forged out the sharp ideological positions that characterized the 1980s and a direct consequence of Thatcherism.

Critical Mass: Sermon for the Church of the Atom (part of A Theatre to Address at Arnolfini, Bristol and Late at Tate Britain)

A Theatre to Address explores the work of contemporary artists who use text as both a visual and sonic form. In this programme, text appears not primarily as a means of communication, but as something which has shape and structure of its own. The Reading Room will also be displaying work that looks at text as concrete or visual poetry, and the script in artists' practice. Clare Gasson presents a new work The traveller - walking walking walking through ... that explores the connection between the text, the rhythm and the action. Maryam Jafri presents a performance-lecture Death With Friends, a body of visual and textual material that forms the basis for her new film of the same name. Pil and Galia Kollectiv present a radical worship for the apocalypse, featuring a sermon for the Church of the Atom with live music by Gelbart.

Laughter in the Dark: ethical aspects of drama education

This chapter considers two questions. Firstly, in what ways might drama be an effective medium through which to explore difficult and sensitive issues that concern teenagers? And secondly, what ethical questions surround the use of drama to explore such issues? A practical workshop on teenage suicide is used as a platform for a discussion on the use and implications of different drama strategies and the role of humour as a critical lens and distancing device. The work of actual teenagers is used to illustrate the effectiveness of the techniques in both raising awareness and facilitating both critical and creative responses to the delicate issue explored in the workshop.